The Flight of the Iguana

by David Quammen

  Here is the secret, as those Papago have known it: The desert is dry but not barren.

  The desert is harsh and intemperate and sometimes forbidding, but not without its moments of sudden bounteousness. The desert (in particular the Sonoran Desert, North America’s driest yet ecologically most complex arid zone, which encompasses that corner of southern Arizona where the Papago Reservation lies) is a landscape of extremity and denial, yes, but you can indeed find things to eat and drink out there—improbable things, tasty things, highly salubrious things—if you happen to know what you are looking for.

  The Papago lived by that secret for hundreds and maybe thousands of years, until the cruel magic of civilization and humid-land agriculture descended upon them. Now the old ways are largely gone, and the Papago have arrived in a strange sort of Canaan, a promised land of modernity that includes refrigerators, pickup trucks, supermarket food, and an epidemic of obesity and diabetes.

  • • •

  The Papago tribe is just one branch of a larger group of Indian peoples known as the Pimans, all sharing a common linguistic base and all adapted culturally to life in their respective parts of the Sonoran Desert. In addition to the Papago of southwestern Arizona and adjacent Mexican borderlands, this group includes the Pima Bajo, the Salt River Pima, and a distinct population called the Sand Papago, native to an especially harsh environment at the north end of the Sea of Cortez. Besides sharing language and ancestors, the Piman tribes now share the particular health problems related to their transition away from desert foods.

  In their own language, the Arizona and borderland Papago know themselves as Tohono O’odham, translated as “The Desert People.” The name Papago itself was hung on them by Spanish colonialists, derived evidently from a garbling of several other words that roughly meant “the Bean Eaters.” Both appellations were accurate, the Spanish version no less so for its tone of snide condescension. These folk did choose to inhabit some of the most unforgiving terrain of the Sonoran Desert, and they did depend heavily, through at least part of the year, on their bean crops.

  The beans in question were teparies, a desert-hardy species of legume that had long been domesticated and treasured among the Papago. These tepary crops were grown each summer from strains of seed lovingly passed down between human generations. Tepary beans were ideally adapted for Papago floodwater cultivation, wherein a field (laid out at the mouth of an arroyo, with a brush dam to spread the runoff) might get only one or two summer soakings and then be left baking dry for three months. The tepary plants grew quickly after a single soaking, sent roots deep, tolerated excessive heat, and reacted well to late-season drought, taking that dryness as merely a signal to shift their metabolic efforts more concertedly toward seed production. Like a camel, tepary plants could gorge on water during a brief period when water was available, then continue to function robustly when it was not. The desert’s feast-and-famine regimen suited them fine. But tepary beans were only one Papago crop among several, and the planted crops raised by means of flood irrigation were only one aspect (a minor one, though important) of how these Desert People made their living.

  Through a larger part of the year they were not farmers but hunter-gatherers. In autumn after the crop harvest, they left their lowland villages for camps in the mountains, where they could find permanent water and wild game. They carried only simple possessions, plus a few baskets of dried beans and other staples, the small surplus from their farming. For the balance of the year they fed on the flesh of deer and bighorn sheep (when they were lucky), doves, rabbits, lizards, and on the fruit, seeds, and other edible parts of more than forty wild Sonoran plants, each coming to ripeness at its own time in its own sort of desert habitat. The Papago traveled their region, mainly on foot, collecting and processing. They ground mesquite pods into flour. They stained their chins with the juice of the saguaro. They had recipes for cholla buds, prickly pear pads, palo verde beans, amaranth greens. They fermented saguaro syrup into wine and agave leaves into mescal. They held ceremonial binges. They feasted, glutting themselves during each season of plenty and giving food away generously to neighbors and relatives. Then the season would change again, and they would go hungry. Sometimes they starved.

  The desert provided bounty but not regularity. This was the nature of the place, and that irregularity was inherent to the deal that the Papago had made with their surroundings.

  The Sonoran landscape is characterized by all manner of drastic vacillations—sweltering days followed by cold nights, long months of drought followed by storms and floods, lush springtime followed by stark roasting summer—and among edible wild plants the cycle from dearth to abundance, then back again to dearth, shows the same abruptness. Peaks of ripening and availability come and go. Gaps occur. In a bad year, some wild crops may fail entirely to materialize. And storage of most of these foods, through months of desert heat, using only traditional methods, is impossible. Consequently the Papago, like the tepary bean, were compelled over the course of time to adapt themselves to a cycle of feast and famine. They evolved a culture that placed great value on mutual generosity, and honored an ethical code among which the first tenets were: “Be hunger enduring, cold enduring, thirst enduring.” Biologically, Papago individuals got by as they could during lean times, and during bounteous times stored what they could in the fatty tissues of their own bodies.

  Today there exists an invidious stereotype of the Papago as a tribe of fat people—great round bodies of sun-browned flesh, male and female, driving pickups or weaving baskets or patiently, ploddingly walking the desert highways. The image is cruel (and also misleading, since many Papago today are still quite thin) but it has grown from a kernel of truth. Obesity is common among the tribe. Such a large number of the Papago, though, were not always overweight—or at least such a number were not always permanently and excessively overweight. The high incidence of obesity, and of its related health problems, seems rather to be an affliction that has come on them with the relinquishment of their desert-forged traditions.

  Probably no Anglo has done more to revere and reevaluate those traditions than a young Arizona botanist named Gary Nabhan. Nabhan has studied the Papago language, done research on the uses and the biology of tepary beans, and helped establish a seed bank for desert-adapted crops, crops which have in recent decades become rare and neglected. He has also written two elegant books. The first was The Desert Smells Like Rain, an anecdotal portrait of Papago country from the viewpoint of a naturalist. More recently he published Gathering the Desert, a celebration of the ethnobotany of Sonoran Desert peoples, which won the Burroughs Medal for natural history writing. In that book Nabhan quotes a Sand Papago elder who remembers the lost self-reliance:

  Long time ago, this was our way of life. We did not buy food. We worked hard to gather our food. We never even knew what coffee was until the white people came. We drank the desert fruit juices in harvest time. The desert food is meant for Indians to eat. The reason so many Indians die young is because they don’t eat their desert food. I worry about what will happen to this new generation of Indians who have become accustomed to present food they buy at the markets.

  • • •

  That was the wisdom of the heart. But some sad medical statistics lend concrete support to the man’s worry.

  According to the Indian Health Service, more than half the adult population of Piman Indians, including the Papago, now suffer from diabetes.

  The levels of gall-bladder disease and hypertension are also startlingly high. These diseases were not common to traditional Piman life. Until after World War II, in fact, they were virtually unknown. Something has changed.

  Civilization has visited itself upon the desert tribes. They have been rescued from their hard and primitive ways into a more advanced, more comfortable state of ruined health.

  In southwestern Arizona this process began as far back as 1917, when the Papago Reservation was founded and its inhabitants first came before the crosshairs of federal
beneficence. A school, a hospital, and an extension service were established. A few wells were dug. “The first problem of all seemed to be the sterility of the land,” in the words of one anthropologist who lived with the Papago long enough that she might have known better, and that common but crucial misconception accounts for much of what followed. During the 1930s more federal money was put toward wells, pumps, reservoirs. Those seasonal migrations to the mountains, for water and wild food, were no longer necessary. Irrigated farming of non-native, humid-land crops was encouraged. So was cattle ranching. Papago men also went off to do wage labor—in New Deal programs, then in the wartime military, later in the mines and on the big cotton farms of southern Arizona—whereby the reservation was shifted toward a cash economy. Refrigerators and freezers arrived. The cycle of gorging and starving faded into memory. By 1950 more than half the food used by the Papago people was store-bought. At the end of the same decade the U.S. government started giving them surplus commodity food as a form of welfare. Federal food surpluses, of course, did not run to cholla buds and mesquite-pod flour.

  Many of the Papago, thus blessed, became fat and sick.

  • • •

  Was the destruction of their health a consequence of heredity or of environment? This question is a point of fierce disagreement. Have the Papago been victimized by an unhealthy diet of plasticized and sugary modern glop? Or have they been victimized by their own genetic predisposition to a cluster of related afflictions, especially obesity and diabetes? You can find medical experts who will argue each of the two hypotheses in its extreme form. Gary Nabhan, by contrast, offers a persuasive explanation that is slightly more complicated.

  Nabhan sees the Piman tribes as a group whose bodies, like their cultures, evolved over many generations to be capable of tolerating the desert cycle of feast and famine. It was an evolutionary as well as an ethical mandate: “Be hunger enduring, cold enduring, thirst enduring.” Those who could gain weight quickly during seasons of plenty, and could survive on their fat reserves during seasons of dearth, did; they were the evolutionary winners. Those who could not do that were more likely to die young, and less likely to leave behind offspring. For centuries this culling acted upon the Piman gene pool. Attuned to their habitat, the survivors gained weight and lost it again as the seasons revolved. Then, with the transition to a regularized modern diet, that hereditary predisposition to speedy weight gain seems to have become suddenly disadvantageous, resulting in chronic obesity and its concomitant, diabetes.

  A genetic phenomenon, to that extent. But there is more.

  Nabhan stresses that the Hopi tribe, the Navajo, and the Cocopa each show a similar susceptibility, suffering from their own dramatically high incidences of obesity and diabetes. So do the aborigines of Australia. It seems more than mildly interesting that, like the Piman tribes, these are all desert peoples. Throughout hundreds of years prior to contact with European civilization and exposure to humid-land diets, they had all been feeding upon the wild bounty of their respective arid landscapes. Sometimes they feasted, sometimes they starved. One way or another, they endured. Natural selection certainly played a role in shaping the genetic profile of the surviving populations. But recent work by scientists in Australia and in this country suggests that the desert itself also actively helped keep them healthy.

  Galactomannin, explains Gary Nabhan, is a natural plant gum found in the seed of mesquite. A number of desert plant species (prickly pear, carob, and chia, among others) contain similar gum compounds. These gums seem to accomplish two biochemical functions. In a plant, they enhance the absorption and retention of water. This might account for why evolution has vouchsafed them to arid-land plant species. In a human body, the effect of those same compounds is to slow the rate at which sugars are released into the blood—and thereby to mitigate the demand for a body’s naturally produced insulin.

  As they consumed the seeds of mesquite, traditional Papago received steady doses of this galactomannin. With other wild plants, they seem to have gotten similar therapeutic gums. Drinking those desert juices and eating those desert fruits, evidently, was more than a matter of grim necessity. It may also have been the healthiest way of life that the Papago people will ever know. “The desert food,” said the old man, “is meant for Indians to eat.” And sometimes biology, like the human heart, has its own forms of wisdom.

  THE DESERT IS A MNEMONIC DEVICE

  Sanctuary in Tucson: 1986

  The traditional Bedouin of the Arabian desert had a name for it: dakhala. A stranger in flight for his life could rush into the tent of another man, claim the privilege of dakhala, and know he would be protected by his reluctant host. This was a sacred custom among the nomadic Arabs. A man who provided dakhala was one who lived by the rules of honor, at whatever cost to himself. He was recognized as upholding a high law—higher than kinship, higher even than vengeance—that the desert itself had helped shape. The desert itself, yes: Dakhala in some measure was an answer to imperatives of landscape, a tool of wilderness survival, a culture’s hedge against heat and desolation and thirst. Lonely death on the sands, or else dakhala, were the fugitive’s prospects.

  In the desert of southern Arizona, today, the equivalent word is sanctuary. But in Arizona, today, it is a felony.

  On May 1, 1986, a federal jury in Tucson convicted eight persons of violating immigration laws. Among the defendants were two Catholic priests, a granite-jawed nun, and a lanky Presbyterian minister. They were found guilty of a variety of offenses that included shielding, concealing, aiding, abetting, and smuggling—also, conspiring to smuggle—illegal aliens. The aliens in question were Salvadorans and Guatemalans, displaced by the murderous chaos in their homelands, who had come north seeking refuge. The possible penalties for these acts of aid and conspiracy ranged up to (in the case of the nun, Sister Darlene Nicgorski, convicted of five felony counts) twenty-five years’ imprisonment.

  The charges had resulted from an elaborate undercover investigation lasting nine months, during which a paid informant for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had worn a concealed recorder into some of the humblest church halls in southern Arizona. But the investigation had in a real sense always been moot, since the defendants were open about their activities. Many of the group had freely admitted to journalists, and to anyone else who would listen, that they were harboring Salvadorans and Guatemalans; that these Salvadorans and Guatemalans, yes, had been obliged to enter the U.S. surreptitiously; that they themselves, the defendants, sought to conceal such people and protect them from deportation. The issue, they said, was why. The issue, they said, was whether these particular Central Americans were in fact “illegal aliens” or, alternatively, legitimate refugees. The issue, they argued, was whether U.S. laws forbade the harboring of such people, or mandated it.

  But the judge in Tucson saw things very differently, and ruled that all arguments on that issue were inadmissible. The case was fought and decided narrowly. Such words as torture and death squads were, in the courtroom, taboo. No one mentioned dakhala.

  • • •

  The proceedings began on October 22, 1985, and dragged on for six months, and to the reporters who covered it, to the public who followed it, this was known as “the sanctuary trial.” It wasn’t actually the first such trial (two church workers in south Texas have been convicted for similar activities), it almost certainly won’t be the last, but so far it has been the biggest and loudest and most dramatic. It was a bellwether prosecution directed against a small group of people, several of whom are perceived as founders and guiding figures of a potent, fast-growing (and, in the U.S. prosecutor’s portrayal, misguided and pernicious) national movement. The movement is called, simply, “sanctuary.” It began, five years ago, with the decision by a small Presbyterian congregation on the south side of Tucson to harbor Central American refugees. Today roughly three hundred religious groups—Quaker meetings, Protestant congregations, Catholic parishes, synagogues—have made the same pledg
e. More than 50,000 U.S. citizens are now involved, each of them risking felony convictions like the ones handed out in Arizona, and their avowed intent is to prevent Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees from being deported back home to jeopardy of imprisonment, mutilation, and death. One of the Tucson defendants, a tough young priest named Tony Clark, defines sanctuary bluntly as “God’s hospitality.”

  The refugees that he has encountered, adds Father Clark, don’t even want to be here in the U.S. “But they’re forced to. They’re running.”

  Since 1980 a half million Salvadorans and more than 80,000 Guatemalans have fled their countries for the United States. Many of them have arrived at our southwestern border without papers and, by this or that ruseful maneuver, gotten across. The total number of these desperate people is minuscule compared with the steady flow of undocumented Mexicans, but large enough to constitute a controversial phenomenon. Why do the Central Americans come north? According to one view (the one offered axiomatically by officials of the State Department and the INS) they are “economic migrants.” In other words, enterprising if impoverished job-seekers, no different from the Mexicans who now pose such a sizable socioeconomic problem. By another view (that of the sanctuary activists), many of those Salvadorans and Guatemalans are “political refugees” in a full legal sense—having escaped from the war zones of Central America, having left behind murdered relatives and their own experiences of torture and imprisonment, having brought with them physical scars and grim memories—and are therefore entitled by U.S. law (not to mention tradition, as inscribed beneath the Statue of Liberty) to at least temporary protection in this country. Specifically, the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980, often cited by sanctuary activists, defines a “refugee” as any person who “is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of [his or her own country] because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. . . .” Several of those conditions do seem to fit most of the Central Americans who come north. The 1980 Refugee Act also stipulates remedies by which a refugee will be protected, one of which is political asylum.